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A Deep Dive Into Tuples in C#
Exploring the versatility of these containers
Tuples are great.
I clearly remember the days before tuples — having trouble figuring out the best way to return multiple values from a method. As soon as tuples were added to C#, I could see so many cases where they would be useful.
And, as they’ve been developed over subsequent versions of C#, they’ve improved. If you’ve not touched them since the early days of tuples, then you’d be forgiven for not recognising them now. They have completely changed, but it’s all good.
Let’s go through where tuples started from and then see how we can use them today.
Tuples Introduced in C#4
Way, way back in 2010, we got a new version of .NET and C#, and this was the first appearance of a tuple.
The aim of this new concept (new to C#, that is) was to make it easier when dealing with small numbers of values. Before tuples, we had to either create a custom class/struct to store the values or use a bunch of ref parameters — neither of which is ideal.
So, we got a new class, unsurprisingly called Tuple, which we could use to hold multiple data elements in a single structure.
Pretty simple, right?
We can define the tuple with generics to specify the data types it will contain, then create one that can be passed around as a single structure.
We can then grab the values out of this tuple:
Simple enough, but if you’re anything like me, those Item1 and Item2 properties are a little meaningless. Just taken on their own, you can’t tell what that value represents.
